I have been “teaching” history to undergraduates in some way for over two decades now. I have experienced what many of the scholars discussed in going from the performer on the stage to trying much more “student-centered” approaches to history. My experience echoes the tensions in the readings. When I lecture, and I have to admit I am pretty entertaining, only a few students seem to care. When I use more active techniques, students mostly feel overwhelmed. I have felt stuck for a while now. Much of the stickiness also comes from trying to negotiate the expectations of our history classes, particularly in the core curriculum. That expectation focuses on content. Students need to know World History to be good citizens of the world. Sure, I agree, but they’re not learning it in our classrooms. Part of the requirement for World History class is to write a “research” paper. I put research in quotes because while they all write a paper, none of them doing history. But we pat ourselves on the back for our efforts, complain about their lack of knowledge, and then repeat the process again.

I have tried to stop this cycle in my classrooms by breaking the rules of expectations (thank goodness for tenure). While I never really thought about or read about the theories of teaching history, I realized that thinking historically did not come naturally to students. Context has no real meaning. I decided the survey format was not useful. I began utilizing Reacting to the Past games in my class. Students were definitely more engaged; I had to stand between Lafayette and a Jacobin in a game on the French Revolution. But they were still struggling understanding the documents let alone understand them in context. Making that jump from reading the sources to truly understanding them in their context, the heart of historical thinking, was the challenge. Fun was being had, but what were they learning? I’m still not sure.

That gets me to the idea of assessment. While my institution did not get denied accreditation because of our lack of assessment, we were put on probation and had a year to turn it around. We fill out the paper work. Send it to the assessment guru. They tell us we’re doing a good job now. Then we pat ourselves on the back for our efforts, complain about students’ lack of knowledge, complain about assessment, and repeat the process again.

So, where am I headed with this? Getting my students to think historically has been my biggest challenge for years. I have had more success with some history majors, but not all. But, as many of the readings discuss, we have to actually be able to articulate why we should study history at all. For academics, it’s clearly important, but we haven’t succeeded in getting buy in from students, their parents, and, to be honest, some administrators.

Some questions I will be considering for this class.

1. How do I get students “unstuck” from their bottlenecks? As the video on threshold learning discusses, I need to first really recognize where that bottleneck begins and then develop some key tasks that can be assessed (not whatever it is we do now) to get them closer to historical thinking.
2. How do I get students to value history as something worthwhile to study? Wineburg stresses the importance of thinking historically as a way to achieve a greater understanding of our own humanity. I agree. Students? Hmmm. I will have to think more of what I have tried and what I can do differently.
3. How do I get students to become more historically literate in this digital age? Information literacy is a big part of our new assessment program. Students take some tutorials. Take a quiz. Then move on. How do develop a better plan for students to be critical of documents? I will be checking out the “reading Like a Historian curriculum as mentioned by Wineburg and Reisman.

Despite being in mid-career, I very much feel like I’m starting over. Wineburg is right, history professors don’t search out articles written by psychology folks on how to teach history. I’m hoping this not so new but new to me information can help get me past my own bottleneck.